Question about using WHM backup utility for my forum

Tourmeister

Tourmeister

New Member
Howdy,

So I want to do daily backups of my forum.

The database itself is only 1.5GB right now, so not real big.

The attachments are probably 35-40GB or so. I don't know the exact number because I cannot figure out how to see how much disk space a given directory's contents use in cPanel. I've tried it in WinSCP, but it takes forever and I never get a number back. There are over 200K files.

I then have another directory of images that has around 20GB. It changes rarely.

When I used the website backup utility in cPanel recently to do the whole thing, it was right at 60GB, which takes a LONG (many hours) time to download to my home computer. The last one I did, I tried to unzip on my home computer and it failed because of a CRC error! I only have 125 GB available for my VPS and there are a few other small websites using some of that space. So I don't actually have another 65GB of free space.

I do have another VPS with HostGator that is basically empty. It has 240GB of space. I went into the WHM backup utility on my KnownHost VPS and created a custom destination. After entering the info for the HG server, I did the validate option and it worked.

Most of the big stuff is static, images and other forms of attachments, although new attachments are being added daily. Is there a way to avoid having to backup the entire attachments directory every time and only capture new stuff? I'd hate to be trying to send 60GB to the HG server every day.

In looking at the options in WHM for the backup, there is a spot that says Files, but there are no options?

whmfiles.jpg


I don't see anyway to pick and choose which files to backup?

Is there an easier way to do this?

I am really new to being the one that handles this stuff on my server. My old server admin moved on and I've never done this stuff, so I am trying to learn. Is there a best practice/method for backing up forum sites?
 
I posted above that I had 125GB of space on the KnownHost VPS, but after checking it is only 100GB.

Does this mean I cannot use the WHM backup feature if the size of the content to be backed up is greater than 50GB?
 
In WHM you can perform Full and Incremental (only backs up the new data since the last backup) backups. You can also set additional destinations such as AWS, Google Drive, or FTP. If you want to use your HG account you can use FTP, preferably SFTP if you can get it working, or Rsync, there are others too. However, you can only use Rsync when doing Incremental backups. If you choose to do Incremental backups you'll want to do regular full backups manually. If you don't, and have to do a recovery, you'll have to go through the full backup then every incremental backup since your last full backup. If you haven't done a full backup in a year or even a month, that's a lot of backups to go through and if any are compromised you'll loose data. I wish WHM offered a differential option which would be greatly beneficial in your case. There are plugins that support differential backups but I have no experience with any as I'm not a fan of plugins at a root level on my server.
 
I'm doing a full compress backup everyday from my WHM to Google Drive. It's about 90GB of data everyday pushed to GoogleDrive. I had to use the biggest VPS at KnownHost as it fills up my disk when create the backup. Disk space hit 90% by the time it can fully transfer all files to gDrive.

gDrive doesn't do Incremental

So from WHM, you cannot choose which files it will backup. Maybe use a third party like JetBackup (I saw that it is newly available on Shared Packages (SH-2) at KnownHost.
 
I've been using automysqlbackup for ages. it has a ton of options including encryption, incremental, ftp to remote site etc.

AutoMySQLBackup

Download AutoMySQLBackup for free. Automatic MySQL Backup. AutoMySQLBackup with a basic configuration will create Daily, Weekly and Monthly backups of one or more of your MySQL databases from one or more of your MySQL servers. Other Features include: - Email notification of backups - Backup...
sourceforge.net sourceforge.net

I use Windows scheduler on local machine to fire a Winscp script to synchronize both my database backups and the site files but I only need to transfer 300MB at most per day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top